These images represent several exposures acquired by the WFC3/UVIS instrument through the F350LP filter on the Hubble Space Telescope. Color has been applied to the grayscale (black&white) images; the brightness maps to different color values.

Hubble snapped images of K2 when the frozen visitor was 1.5 billion miles from the Sun, just beyond Saturn's orbit. Even at that remote distance, sunlight is warming the frigid comet, producing an 80,000-mile-wide coma that envelops a tiny, solid nucleus.

K2 has been traveling for millions of years from its home in the Oort Cloud, a spherical region at the edge of our solar system. This frigid area contains hundreds of billions of comets, the icy leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.